Brian K Haney With Brian K Haney, LLC

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Coach the Coach radio brought to you by the Business RadioX Ambassador Program, the no cost business development strategy for coaches who want to spend more time serving local business clients and less time selling them. Go to brxambassador.com To learn more. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:33] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Coach the Coach Radio, and you’re in for a treat with this one today on the show, we have Brian K. Haney, who is a team effectiveness coach. Welcome, Brian. Hi, Lee. I am so excited to be chatting with you today. Before we get too far into things. Tell us about your practice, how you serve serving folks, and the journey you’ve been on to get to where you are today.

Brian K Haney: [00:00:59] Well, my practice right now is in the middle of a pivot. So let’s see, where do I start my story? Up until last December. December 20 20, I was a I worked at Google and there I was doing internal coaching. I did a little bit of external coaching too, just on the side. But when I was doing career and leadership coaching at Google until I left Google a year ago and I’ve been taking twenty twenty one as a sabbatical year, I am now at the point where I need to reboot my side business to become my primary occupation.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:37] So how’s the how’s the transition?

Brian K Haney: [00:01:40] Well, I’m experimenting with different brands and different branding ideas like you introduced me as a team, as a team effectiveness coach, that’s one of the emphases in my practice. I’m considering being a little more of a. Well, I I used to I was familiar with the pirate coach or a rebel coach. But what I really want to do is I want to focus on team leaders who want to kind of take their team to the next level of and do things in a way that might be a little unorthodox in the traditional organizational perspective.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:28] Now, in your past, you’ve worked a lot with self-managed teams at some.

Brian K Haney: [00:02:34] So that’s where he got started. I back in 2016, when I was at Google, my cloud support team of about 75 engineers and program managers. We started practicing Holacracy and we did that for a few months until until we had a larger reorganization that our and our new directors who are assigned to our to our team said. We don’t understand this. We don’t know why you’re doing it. We don’t want to do it anymore. So that was kind of my introduction to the culture was in that context because I was basically the became the in-house expert and I was I was coaching my peers and other leaders on the larger team to basically. Redefined their role because if they couldn’t be managers, what could they be? Well, there had to be leaders or they could be leaders. And so I was helping them transition from being managers to leaders.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:34] Now for those, can you explain a little bit about ocracy because I know a little bit about it and I’m kind of fascinated by it and especially to be talking to somebody who implemented or at least attempted to implement it. Can you talk about what you like about it, what you don’t like about it and kind of the the theory behind it?

Brian K Haney: [00:03:52] Well, what I like the most fun things I like most about it were it was a sense of autonomy, the sense of agency in my roles and every role in my opinion, should have a purpose that wasn’t acquired. But but if every role had a well-defined purpose that kind of gave focus for for what you would do to energize that role and that sense of of a clear direction and an agency, I found that rather intoxicating. It reminded me of when I first joined Google back in two thousand six and how I felt empowered and know that was in a corporate environment. I didn’t expect that.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:37] And then the basis of it is a very flat organization, right?

Brian K Haney: [00:04:41] Not necessarily. Not really. So it’s there’s still a hierarchy there, but it’s not a hierarchy of managers. It’s a hierarchy of circles. So there is a. There’s still a structure and the structure can’t it can’t be deep, but that that creates a what I would call latency in the organization, so it makes the organization respond slower or more slowly, I should say. But there’s no there’s still it’s not I wouldn’t really call it flat.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:15] But but the autonomy is really you’re empowering the your participant to be a leader rather than a manager because most of them are working on some sort of projects. So it’s a different structure from that standpoint, isn’t it?

Brian K Haney: [00:05:33] Yes. So in the sense that. There’s there are still, you know. Collections of people working together to accomplish a shared shared objective, and that is

Lee Kantor: [00:05:51] That’s like the true north of the organization, right? Like everybody’s clear on this is the big mission we’re trying to accomplish. But how we get that done? There’s a lot about autonomy.

Brian K Haney: [00:06:03] To do that well. So there’s the organization as a whole has a purpose, and then each circle inside the organization has a purpose in support of the higher purpose. So, for example, the support engineers might have a purpose to. Well, I make the customers successfully using Google Cloud platform, but the the support organization as a whole might phrase that a little differently to have a larger perspective.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:41] So now as you kind of get into your practice moving forward into twenty twenty two. How do you see yourself kind of identifying who is the right fit ideal client for you?

Brian K Haney: [00:06:55] My ideal client is a a tech team, a technical leader who has a either I.T. team or a software development team or some other team. Because being a recovering engineer myself, I know how to speak geek and they they want to engage more of their the whole person that’s coming to work. They want to have a shared sense of purpose, a shared values. They want to do more inviting of the team instead of pushing the team. And they want their team to be more engaged to have a greater sense of of of ownership and a greater stake in how how effective the team as a whole is. So that’s my ideal client. And then they I’ll come along, come alongside those those team leaders and help them to show them ways they can make that happen. Or if they want me to engage me as a consultant to to actually work with the team directly, I can do that, too.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:16] So now is some of the frustration that they might be having is that they’re not satisfied with the level of performance or the amount of worker engagement or those some of the issues that they’re struggling with right now that where you can help.

Brian K Haney: [00:08:32] Definitely. I’m sure people have seen the the reports in Inked Magazine and The Wall Street Journal about how the worker engagement is a fraction of what it should be. I can’t remember the numbers, but it’s something like twenty five percent or less of of workers around the world are engaged in the work the rest are, or I’m really looking for another job and to be able to. The key there, in my opinion, is to at least from the leaders perspective, is to help them to reinvent the work or for them to to to co-create a work environment that is more inviting and more engaging, and it has more intrinsic motivation. So work shouldn’t be just a job where it should be. You going to spend the vast majority of your waking hours doing work or at least, you know, be a part of it. So it shouldn’t be this thing where you’re just coasting and getting by and waiting for your paycheck.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:43] So how do you help them? Kind of. Repositioned in the mind of the worker, that is more than a job, like what are some of the things that you can be doing to to kind of instill more meaning?

Brian K Haney: [00:09:58] The first thing to do is to cultivate an environment of psychological safety. This is something that Google does internal research on and what makes for an effective team, and psychological safety came out far and away the most important characteristic of effective teams. And without that, hardly anything else matters, because if it’s not a safe place for me to let down my mask or to be authentic and genuine with my with my teammates, then. Nothing else is really going to. You’re not going to make any other practice or any other advances in creating a great work culture.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:40] But it’s psychological safety. Something is that in the eye of the beholder, is my psychological safety different than yours?

Brian K Haney: [00:10:48] Psychological safety is definitely a perception, but it’s something that it’s cultivated among people. So it’s it’s fundamentally do I feel safe enough that I could take reasonable risks? Um, and if if if my if I if I fail at a project, you know, as long as I’ve made a good faith effort is is that going to reflect poorly on my standing in the organization? Or can I can I make a mistake and feel like I can own up to it? Or can I? Can I push back on something that leadership says is is a way to a way to do it? And I say, can I say, wait a minute, did you consider this or I’m not sure you have all the facts, and so can I or I. The team’s plate is overloaded, but what do we need to let go of so we can take on this, this new project that you’re asking us to take on? So do they feel safe enough to do that? That that sort of thing, that’s that’s something is probably going to be shared among all the team members, at least all the team members that have been there for at least a few weeks now.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:14] When you’re doing something like that, how do you kind of. Create an environment that allows that to happen, but still not really, I don’t know if you want to, I don’t know if it encourages the right word, but you don’t want to have a room full of people second guessing every single call because they have an opinion. Also, I mean, you want to hear everybody, I guess, but you you can’t act on everybody’s vision of what is the next right move?

Brian K Haney: [00:12:48] Certainly. And that’s why in particular, is not a democracy. While people are empowered to take actions to fulfill their role and they could, they can object to a proposal to the extent that it detracts from their ability to to to energize the purpose of their own role or the purpose of the team. But just because they might have an opinion about about a proposal if they don’t have, if it doesn’t, it’s not going to affect any roles that they feel. They don’t have a voice.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:32] And but that’s that’s under the hypocrisy model, right? I mean, there is. So most companies aren’t practicing Holacracy.

Brian K Haney: [00:13:42] That’s true. That’s true. And so I’m kind of conflating things in psychological safety. The general tendency is that that unless people feel. A. Deeply impacted by something, but probably not going to speak up. There’s a built in tendency in the human psyche to let things ride without making waves. And it’s it’s not

Lee Kantor: [00:14:14] Just human behavior.

Brian K Haney: [00:14:16] Yeah, it is. It is. And. And so the the the the problem you propose that you’re proposing that everybody has a voice. We can’t act on all the voices. Well, those voices are generally very small. So, so it’s usually not an issue, right?

Lee Kantor: [00:14:35] Ok, now you mentioned also risk. Most organizations give lip service to wanting being OK with taking risks, but you can only fail so many times before they’re going to start going. Maybe you’re not the right person for the job.

Brian K Haney: [00:14:54] So there’s two things there. One is yes, organizations will have posters in the wall that encourage you to to

Lee Kantor: [00:15:03] Push the envelope, right? But think outside the box all of that stuff that they want you to do. But sometimes when you’re doing that, you’re going to fail miserably and dramatically. And it’s not going to work and don’t. Don’t you think that people are a little gun shy that they don’t want to be the one that keeps coming up with harebrained ideas that never work? But the only way you’re going to find those breakthroughs are, you know, when you are taking those kind of big swings.

Brian K Haney: [00:15:34] Probably the best way to illustrate a way of of managing risk is what what Google does, and Google is very they have the blameless postmortem. I wouldn’t call a protocol, but it’s a a system of handling large failures. So in a blameless postmortem after a failure has happened and if somebody pushed the wrong button, we’ll uncover that later on. But after the failure, there’s a. an analysis to see what were the events that led up to the failure and what was the sequence and how did how did we respond to the failure and how did we get things back to a stable state? And usually that or very often that that postmortem might be led by a. A team leader or might be led by the person who was on call at the time and had the most impact on making the failure a failure. So once they’ve collected all information, the whole idea there is first assume benign intent. Nobody on the team is trying to make the system fail. They’ll make that assumption. And because it’s not true, you have bigger problems, right? That means you have a saboteur.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:09] Yeah, that’s obvious. Good point.

Brian K Haney: [00:17:13] So let’s assume that nobody wants to make the system failure. So the only other reason the only the only two reasons to let somebody go is if they’re they’re malicious, which would be the saboteur or the completely incompetent. And that cannot be fixed. It cannot be reassigned to another job. They can’t trained. The vast majority of problems are systemic. Either the the tools to do the monitoring and detecting a of a situation and do a situational awareness were inadequate or the. Uh, were or the tools to to rectify the situation weren’t adequate or the documentation was poor or the metric the metrics were were poor or the training was poor or communication among the team or with other teams that were that had to be part of the scenario were poor. So these are all systemic problems, not personal problems. And so the question is what can we do now to tune our system to be to avoid or better respond to this kind of a failure in the future? So that’s something that that your organization can do or the team can do that really cultivates a sense of psychological safety is now we’re going to assume the best of intent and unless we’re proven, unless proven otherwise, we’re going to, we’re going to go with that.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:53] So now if there’s a company out there that wants to have a conversation with you or somebody on your team to improve their performance and maybe, you know, just drive better and more engaged workforce, what is the best way to get a hold of you? Is there a website?

Brian K Haney: [00:19:14] Probably the best way to reach out to me is on LinkedIn. My handle there is Brian Kahaani. My website is Brian K. Hanekom and my email address is I’m going to say this out loud at Brian K. Hanekom,

Lee Kantor: [00:19:30] And that’s Brian K. Haney is spelled BRACA and K. H. A and why?

Brian K Haney: [00:19:38] That’s it.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:39] Well, Brian, thank you so much for sharing your story today. It is an exciting journey for you and a lot of fun adventures ahead.

Brian K Haney: [00:19:47] I’m sure I’m looking forward to it.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:50] All right. Well, we appreciate you coming on and sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Brian K Haney: [00:19:56] It’s been a great conversation.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:57] All right, this is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Coach the Coach radio.